Serving customers for over 200 years, BMO Financial Group (BMO) provides a broad range of personal and commercial banking, wealth management, and investment banking products and services to customers across Canada, the United States, and in select markets globally.
BMO has long been a leader in digital innovation and won awards for its approach to eSignature and eForms deployment.
This was not simply innovation conducted for innovation’s sake: at the time, it was reported that increased frontline capacity led to more customer conversations, productivity efficiency gains and significant cost savings due to paper elimination. Moreover, removing paper from the branch ecosystem aligned with BMO’s sustainability goals.
Sajjad Butt leads BMO’s E-Forms and ESignature Center of Excellence (EECOE). Butt’s team deploys reusable processes and technologies that allow faster scaling, smarter solution building, and more expedient deployment to staff, all in the interest of increased productivity and efficiency.
“My goal is to make us paperless,” Butt says. “I want paper out of our ecosystem. Our digital signing capabilities address a big part of that.”
An important part of this capability is SecureSign, a front-end application developed by BMO on the technology backbone supplied by OneSpan.
BMO’s digitization journey started in 2015, as an incremental process that started with basic in-branch transactions. Everyday banking tends to be paper reliant- it's high-volume and impacts a wide workforce, that is where BMO determined there was an opportunity to introduce employees to digitizing documents.
The journey began with branch scanning as the foundational method to ingest documents digitally into BMO’s digital library. Based on lessons learned, tablets were gradually introduced to the workforce for customer digital signature collection in branches through the eSign application. With every ‘digitization release’ BMO built on the previous releases.
“We were gaining efficiencies with eSignatures and looking at expanding the scope of products and services eligible for digital signature collection but had to pause due to COVID. That's where OneSpan came into play. We needed that solution to make sure that we didn't disrupt services to our customers.”
Eliminating paper is not just about cost-cutting. It also improves customer experience. Simplified processes allow BMO employees to spend more time with customers.
EARLY BUILDING BLOCKS
BMO has been leveraging eSignature for nearly a decade — and continues to build on the impressive business benefits they saw within just months of kicking off the digitization of their retail branches. Here’s what the numbers look like as of November 2024:
- 33+ million documents in a secured Digital Library
- 15+ million eSigned transactions
- 1.7+ million signatures collected remotely
USER EXPERIENCE STANDARDIZATION
At a time when banks globally are looking to create a truly omnichannel presence, it’s critical to manage continuity and consistency in the customer experience. In effect, this is what BMO has done by creating an enterprise COE to manage the digital agreement user experience across channels.
BMO wants all forms to have a similar look and feel with the same visual standards. When it comes to signing the documents, the bank wanted to keep the experience consistent regardless of the channel.
Another scenario that the team solved is providing the ability to both remotely capture signatures from customers that are not present at the branch or use the platform in the event the customer does visit the branch.
The added advantage of SecureSign is it has expanded BMO’s capabilities to collect digital signatures even without tablets, which has made the opportunity to collect digital documents much easier for a wider workforce.
For example, an employee may not have access to tablets, but they may conduct transactions that generate documents, which in turn require signatures. Having the ability to capture electronic signatures with this new application has helped increase their e-signature adoption, and save some costs around printing, scanning, storing paper that would have been incurred without electronic signing.
TIME SAVINGS
The integration of SecureSign into BMO systems has removed the need to navigate between platforms when collecting signatures from their customers remotely, saving their employees an average of 5 minutes per transaction. With around 100,000 remote transactions a month across the network, this translates to over an hour saved per branch per week. This time can now be focused on having more holistic customer conversations.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Although BMO has already recorded impressive results thanks to its digitization efforts, there’s still work to be done, according to Butt.
“We're expanding the capability across other lines of businesses, but what’s been done has paved the way for the road ahead”, Butt says. “Over time, we've seen the costs associated with form digitization come down, which has helped our acceleration."